"It seemed very remarkable that you could travel halfway around the world and still end up looking at some ducks."

― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

"Я вышла в магазин еще и потому, что это простое действие, которое имеет начало, конец и цель; вот так просто, за час можно совершить действие с началом, концом и результатом. Когда живешь во времени ожидания, маленькие бессмысленные дела оказываются очень важными."

― Оксана Васякина, Рана

"In critical circles, nostalgia has a negative, even decadent connotation. But the etymology of the word uncovers other meanings. It comes from the Greek nostos, a return home, and algos, pain. According to Jane Gallop, after “homesickness” and “melancholy regret” in the dictionary there is a third definition of nostalgia, which is “unsatisfied desire.” And that is what the word has always implied to me: unconsummated desire kept alive by private forays into the cultural spaces of memory."

― Moyra Davey, Index Cards

"You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?"

― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

"In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you."
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

"We want to make choices, and have some agency in getting lost, and getting found. We want to challenge the city, and decipher it, and flourish within its parameters."

― Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

"I want to know
what it means to survive
something.
does it just mean
I get to keep my body?"

― Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party

"What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human."

― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"How precarious my life feels now. Will we move, will we stay here, will we have to welcome it, to see possibilities in it, not foreclose ourselves? Maybe we belong here, in this city. Or where else? How will I continue to exist, to write? I feel almost mesmerized by this sadness lately."

― Kate Zambreno, Drifts: A Novel

"The caesura of death is the point where legacy and memory begin, and the lament the source of every culture by which we seek to fill the now gaping void, the sudden silence with chants, prayers, and stories in which the absent one is brought back to life. Like a hollow mold, the experience of loss renders visible the contours of the thing mourned, and it is not uncommon for it to be transformed by the transfigurative light of sorrow into an object of desire..."

― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

"Patti, did art get us?'
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.'
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint."

― Patti Smith, Just Kids

"I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is."

― Ben Lerner, 10:04

"We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float."

― Teju Cole, Open City